Corinthian Colleges, Inc., a chain of for-profit colleges, said in a federal filing Wednesday that the U.S. Education Department had rejected "many" of the company's requests for new programs because of concerns about its reporting of job placement and other information. Company officials disputed an assertion made in a January letter from the Education Department that Corinthian had "admitted falsifying" placement or grade information, saying instead that the company had detected and reported to federal authorities "isolated instances" of misreporting.

If they want to be paid, college athletes might be better off declaring themselves interns and seeking compensation under the Fair Labor Standards Act than they will be in seeking unionization, a Bloomberg Businessweek article suggests. Unpaid interns who work in similar conditions have been successful in lawsuits when they’ve shown that their employer derived “immediate advantage” from the intern’s work, that they didn’t benefit from the experience, and that they displaced regular employees.

The Northwestern football players who petitioned to form the College Athletes Players Association last month say they are not immediately seeking compensation, just full coverage for sports-related medical expenses and more rights regarding safety and other issues. But a push for more money could come in the future.

Fund raisers at American colleges and schools estimate that giving to their institutions grew by 5.1 percent in 2013 in will grow by 5.2 percent this year, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education said its twice-year survey had found.

The figures for higher education alone were flipped, at 5.2 percent for 2013 and 5.1 percent for 2014. And public colleges and universities were more upbeat than their private college counterparts, estimating donations to their institutions at 5.7 percent and 5.6 percent, respectively, compared to 4.8 percent for both years for private colleges.

The American Council on Education, the umbrella group of higher education associations in Washington, announced Wednesday that it will add a longtime Education Department official to its lobbying team.

Daniel T. Madzelan, who for several decades was a senior career staffer at the department and served a short stint as acting assistant secretary for postsecondary education at the beginning of the Obama administration, will become the group’s new associate vice president for government relations. He left the department in March 2012, having served for 33 years under six presidents and nine education secretaries.

Madzelan will take the position at the American Council of Education that was held by Becky Timmons, who retired last week after 40 years at the organization.

In today’s Academic Minute, Benjamin Black of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discusses the connection between volcanism and one of the largest extinctions in Earth’s history. Learn more about the Academic Minute here.

Cultural Anthropology, the flagship journal of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, became the latest scholarly journal to go open access with the publication of its February issue this week. Launched in 1986, the journal is the first published by the American Anthropological Association to go open access, the society noted in a press release.

The University of California at Los Angeles has revised its travel guidelines in the wake of an investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting. The California-based news organization uncovered top officials bending travel rules to fly in business or first class and staying in luxury hotels. The revised rules, announced in an internal email from UCLA’s provost late last month, are designed to ensure employees make “prudent” arrangements. The internal email was first reported on and posted online by the UCLA student newspaper.

Brandeis University is offering buyouts to about 150 staffers amid an estimated $6.5 million deficit, The Boston Globe ​reports. Last month, the university paid nearly $5 million to its former president in deferred compensation and for unused sabbatical. A spokeswoman for the university told the paper the large payout to the president did not factor into the decision to offer the voluntary buyouts, which do not affect faculty members.